Banquet for the Damned (15 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Running as fast as he is able, his bare feet skim across the surface of an empty field. Blades of long grass catch between his toes and then snap away. Stalks of the thicker weeds whip against his shins and around his calf muscles to leave a sting. Under a clear blue sky, he flees across this seemingly endless grass, bordered by tall trees of a dense summer green; a place he's not seen in years, but one that is instantly familiar to the vague sense of consciousness he possesses in the most harrowing of dreams. This is a place he's not run through since a child, and only then as he slept while the twitches of his eyelashes kept time with his pounding feet.

But tonight, things are as vivid as they have ever been. It is as if he can smell the pollen of midsummer, and feel the warmth of the sun on his skin, and see the whites and yellows of the butterfly wings he has startled into life and then quickly passed. And he knows where this race will lead and how it will end.

Aware it is a dream, but unable to wake himself, Dante finds himself in the grip of a terror so strong he even tries to call out to himself, to stop himself from running any further through this grass toward the centre of the pasture. He wants to shout out and warn himself that he is alone, that no one for miles can hear him, that the field is disused. But still he runs, and so fast now he begins to lose his balance, right in the middle of the field. And as his head lurches forward, his legs buckle, his knees clash together like dull cymbals, and his hands start crazy windmills in the air, he prepares for the anticipated fall.

One of his feet lands in a hollow on a patch of uneven ground beneath the sea of unmown grass. The leg straightens and jars his body from ankle to neck. But the momentum of his charge carries the rest of his body over, jack-knifed in the middle, so the top of his head faces the earth and his arms fly backward and his fingers point at the sky. Braced for the snapping of his delicate neck, he closes his eyes and puts himself in the dark. But the top of his head never strikes the earth, his neck never twists, and his body never flops over in an ungainly gambol. Instead, he carries on falling, straight as a stone dropped into a well, without his shoulders or ribs or legs touching the sides of that which he plummets down at such speed.

There is the sudden sound of a wind blowing up through the hole, which instantly replaces the sounds of the birds and insects, back up there, above ground level. Now everything is dulled, shut out, and finally silenced. Even the lights go out when the sides of his shoulders hit the walls of the giant soil pipe which runs in a vertical line from its opening, in the middle of the disused field, to the centre of the earth. Down it travels, through miles of damp clay, reddy brown and tiered with strata of worm and root and thick, endless, soundproofed earth.

His fall slides to a stop. His shoulders are jammed against the sides of the red pipe; the soles of his bare feet face the coin-sized portion of sky, at the mouth of the hole. The pipe has narrowed as it descends, hundreds of feet down, until something man-sized has eventually become lodged, headfirst, below ground.

In a split second, he tries to do several things, fails, and the full realisation of his predicament hits him. First, he tries to move his arms, but they are stuck fast; the force of the fall has lodged him in the tunnel, air-tight and upside down. Then he instinctively attempts to bend his knees. No use; he can only widen his ankles a fraction, and his kneecaps strike the smooth side of the pipe the moment he attempts to bend his legs. He tilts his head back an inch but the crown of his skull also hits the solid wall of the pipe.

When he screams for his mother and his father, as he did so many years ago, his voice is high-pitched, but smothered by the infinite darkness he stares down and into. Unable to wriggle back up, with gravity against him and his shoulders squeezed tight and stuck fast, he realises in a fraction of a second that no matter how much he wants to see his family and friends again, to enjoy Christmas and walk on the sun-baked sands of family holidays, and to exult in every joy of childhood, he is trapped. Stuck forever; confined in the earth like a dead man in a coffin. His voice fails; hysteria follows. From the back of his brain and down into every muscle, bone, tendon, fibre and molecule of his body, the coldest panic fills him up.

Dante wakes. He sits bolt upright in bed. His heart whacks the sides of his ribcage. Staring about himself, in a mess of wet sheets and duvet, he sees that he is no longer trapped underground. It was a dream. He is at home, in the flat, in his bed, facing the window that overlooks the East Scores.

Dante gives immediate thanks to God that it is nothing more than a nightmare, and that he is awake and not buried alive with the blood rushing to his head. If there is a hell, that would be it for him: the soil pipe in the middle of a deserted field. He hopes to God there is no such thing as hell.

Rubbing his hands over his face, he knows he cannot risk going back to sleep in case he finds himself running again, at speed, toward the pipe. It is the same realisation he grasped as a child, when he waited for the morning light to drift through the curtains of his room, and only then would he doze until his mother woke him with a call for school.

But why has the dream returned? No sooner does he begin this train of thought than he stops thinking. Something has just moved, at the end of his bed.

Dante feels his body go cold; he swallows but is unable to move. He squints into the dark. He can see the shape of the wardrobe, the edges indistinct and almost vibrating in what little light the moon emits through chinks in the curtains. Beside the wardrobe is the window sill and the shape of something before it, interfering with the thin lines of seeping light.

Hunched over, with something about the head, like a hood, or some manner of swathing, the figure sits and, he is certain, watches him. Dante closes his eyes and then opens them, trying to banish the vision – the residue from the awful dream. But as his eyes refocus, he sees that it is still there. Waiting.

'Shit,' he says. But he only has enough air to say that, and nothing more. As if stirred into life by the sound, the intruder stands up, quickly, and rises to an unnatural height, so the top of its head is lost against the murk of the ceiling. It moves past the bed in a quick upright glide, no more than a foot away from the base of the bedframe. Dante feels every hair stand upright on his body. A cry is stifled in his throat. His eyes water. He prays for his heart to stop before it comes for him.

But when it turns, with a swish of air, it moves toward the closed door of his room and away from his bed. Its outline disappears against the dark wood of the door that the moonlight fails to illumine, even in part. And through that black rectangle of door, it carries on moving, right through and into the hallway, without a sound.

Wrapped in his duvet, Dante leaps from his bed. He scrambles across the room, the carpet rough against the soles of his bare feet. Stretching one hand from the folds of duvet, he slaps his palm against the wall, fumbling for where he remembers the light switch to be. His fingers brush across it, return, and then click the light on.

For a moment, as the light bursts from the bulb, he winces and flinches back, expecting to see the intruder reaching for him.

There is nothing there. No one in his room and the door is closed. Everything is as it was before he climbed into bed; still orderly, beside the clothes he wore that day, now strewn about the floor where he left them. Pulling the duvet up around his shoulders, Dante sits on the corner of his bed, still in shock, with his instincts telling him it is all an omen, that it has a meaning, that he is in danger and must leave. Never has he felt this so strongly about anywhere he's slept.

He struggles to think of sufficient cause for the return of his childhood haunting, and then for this imagined intruder. The move from Birmingham and all that has befallen him since has been something of a roller coaster, with his spirits rising and falling and finding no middle ground. But has he been unsettled enough to dream of the pipe, and then to see something at the foot of his bed, waiting for him to wake?

There is something especially vivid about each experience, as if they were stronger and clearer than it is natural for nightmares and waking visions to be. And it is the worst place he can think of to have such thoughts, being so close to the rotten cathedral, with generations of old bones hidden under its cracked slabs, and across the road from the castle, with the memorials on its pavements to those burned to death, or hung from windows – a hundred yards from his bed.

With heavy eyelids, he went to bed on a high after meeting Beth, having returned home to smoke a quick joint. He should have passed out and not woken until at least eleven the following morning. There is no call for such a disturbance.

Lighting a cigarette to keep his hands busy and his mind occupied, Dante wanders through to the kitchen, hastily turning on every light he passes. After switching the kettle on, he finds the novel he was reading before they left for Scotland. He'll sit this one out, like he did as a child, until dawn breaks. And then, and only then, will he allow himself to close his eyes again.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Was her mouth stuck in an enticing pout? Was there a becoming cluster of freckles on the bridge of her nose, and a subtle hint of rouge on high cheekbones? He can't be sure, cannot remember, but he does know every part of her face seemed to draw him toward the green of her eyes. Precious eyes, revealing little of the thoughts flitting through the mystery and dark of her pretty head.

In the light of midday, after the worst of his shock at the night's disturbances has passed, Dante lies on the couch and tries to recall Beth's face from the night before. But the more he tries to visualise her features the more indistinct they become. It is as if she has mostly escaped from his memory, to leave only an impression – an enchantment for him to obsess over. Eventually, his desperate efforts to remember her begin to spoil the magic, so he settles on the prevailing sense that she is exquisite to look at, and that he'll meet her again, soon.

But who is she? A student embroiled in an affair with an old wanderer and academic, attracted by a fierce intellect and its unconventional tastes? He can hardly see her dancing in nightclubs or enjoying the company of a regular circle of girlfriends. Beth is no ordinary girl. There is a wisdom in her. Something older than her years wrapped up in something childlike, like tenderness. A combination of maturity and vulnerability. And wasn't that what he saw and craved in Imogen too? But Beth goes beyond his fixation with Imogen. And Beth sweeps aside the tired attitude he's adopted toward girls since that disappointment. He feels as if, after only a brief introduction, she's reinvigorated something meaningful inside him, made him rediscover an intensity of feeling he's either forgotten or given up on.

But is there not the danger of disappointment also? She'll demand the finest clothes and eat special foods; she'll rocket across the sky in first class, and wear sunglasses by rippling turquoise waters, while palm leaves shudder above her. She's the kind of girl he's seen in London, with that cold, focused beauty, who strides across airport marble, indifferent to admirers, or sits alone at a café table, listening to some exclusive whisper from a chic mobile phone. Beth will want an extraordinary man; age will be of no consequence. How can he compete? Maybe she'll experiment with a musician for as long as he proves interesting and his scene stays valid, and then she'll be gone to a painter in Milan, or a terrorist in Paris. She has choices and lovers, her leather cases are full of expensive clutter, her windows are watched by drawn faces, sapped of blood by the rents in once confident hearts. The very thought of her past, her expectations and moods, makes him feel acutely fragile; he can almost taste the beginnings of his own despair.

Toward the end of their brief contact, in the shadow of an old church, she seemed distracted too. He remembers the flutter of ecstasy on the child-queen's face the moment she left him. Something he's occasionally seen captured on a model's face in a fashion shoot, featured in a copy of
Tatler
or
Vogue
, when he's leafed through pages reeking of opened perfume samples outside a doctor's surgery. What was she looking for in the Quad? What did she sense with her divine face? Was it a friend she planned to meet? Eliot said something to that effect. But who can say how these strange circles of Sloanes operate? They live in a different world. He guesses he would only come into contact with them in places like St Andrews, the Oxford of Scotland, where the students have money and boarding-school peers with unbelievable names. This is an alien place, with its cool air, hidden interiors and stone crevasses. He is still so far from learning its language.

Warm and relaxed, he lies in the crater his body has moulded around itself on the sofa cushions. While his mind brims with doubts and promises of something extraordinary that Beth might provide, he uses these impressions of her to obscure the fright he's received but still fails to explain to himself. Drawn from the first cigarette of the day, smoke curls about his flat belly and hangs over the green glass of the ashtray, placed between the golden belly ring and his tattoo of the Def American record label, inscribed around his navel. Cold glass feels good in the centre of so much warmth. Smiling, he wonders if Beth will ever trace a long fingernail around the fine lines of the tattoo. Most of his girlfriends have been fascinated with it.

But caution is everything. He is a hard-luck champion who eats chips with a tarnished fork; he belongs in bedsit land and on nightservice buses. A man who has made his choices and now lies in a different bed. So what does Eliot want with him anyway and why should Beth care? Some high-brow undergraduate would have been more suited to assisting Eliot with his work – not a man who lives in biker bars and plays Faster Pussycat covers for drinks.

And as he idles in the strong sunlight that falls across him from the garden windows, Dante wonders if they are toying with him. Is he a new curiosity to be tossed between sharp claws? Is he crazy for travelling so far, hastily setting sail in a rusty boat with the closest approximation to a male prostitute for a companion – his best friend, to the end?

Beyond the windows, the new world continues to glow, trapped in its infinite summer. The sky is blue again, and the country a lush green around the clump of majestic architecture perched on this jagged harbour. Amongst the rush of emotion and thought that fires through him, and then suddenly changes course and alters into fresh feelings and contradictory notions, Dante can identify excitement. This is an adventure he's fallen into, and the thrill-seeking part of him relishes it all. St Andrews, with its bickering academics and bloody history, is waiting to be discovered. He feels like a warrior from a Robert E Howard novel, wading ashore on some forgotten isle to tremble before the sight of distant black spires.

But despite his ecstatic first impressions of the town, when he was overwhelmed by the sea and the sunlight, he's become aware of something else. Although the place radiates the elegance and romance of any well-preserved site of antiquity, there's another feature so well hidden he only catches flashes of it, when particularly alert. A quality not entirely pleasant, if he is honest. Perhaps that taints his impression of the town, affects his feelings for Beth, heightens his suspicion, and gives him nightmares. It is possible. Because St Andrews possesses its own peculiar brand of darkness. It is hard to define while he gorges his senses on the freshness of a new and spectacular environment. But, all the same, it is there. Every monument to a martyr burned slowly for heresy speaks of injustice, and every skeletal ruin of church and tower hints at death. Nights have shadows deeper than any city and the impenetrable, almost oppressive, grey stone reminds him of a great and ornate mausoleum slab, dropped into place to cover forgotten plagues and unrecorded tortures. Here exists another threat, an old and clever one, like organised religion, he thinks, remembering the teachings of
Banquet
.

Whistling drifts into the lounge from the bathroom and breaks his train of thought. Dante sits up in bed, alert to the sound. Impatience in the performer spoils the melody he can hear Tom whistling. It's the tune for
Sweet Child of Mine
, which Tom always recites when trifled. When Tom joins him in the lounge, he stands in the middle of the room and lashes the lid off his Zippo against the seam of his jeans, before striking the flint down his thigh to create fire. 'Where did you piss off to last night?'

Dante stretches his legs out and mumbles through a fake yawn. 'Oh, I got tired. I was just like a fish out of water. How about you?' he adds, to change the subject.

'Don't change the subject. You never even said goodbye. I saw you with this fat guy and then you were gone. Was that Eliot?'

'No, it was the Hebdomidar, and you were busy with that blonde.

I only saw Eliot for a minute.'

'I wanted to meet him.'

'Busy man, Tom. Not a scratcher like you.'

Tom raises two fingers at Dante before disappearing back into the kitchen to rummage for milk.

'You dehydrated?' Dante asks.

Tom nods on his way back to the lounge. His eyes go wide over the rim of a plastic one-litre bottle of semi-skimmed milk.

'Did you cop off with that lass?'

Tom sneers, then burps.

'Well?'

'Been here three days, and already I'm the strike-out king of Scotland.'

Dante starts to titter. He knows what's coming. 'Tom, you cannot expect every girl to shag you on the first night.'

'Why not?'

'Cus this ain't a rock club in Birmingham five years ago. These girls are different.'

'You're telling me. We drank a bottle, she was eating out of my hand and all I said was "fancy a walk?". She was just like stunned and made some pathetic excuse.'

'Tom!' Dante cries out, trying to conceal his mirth. 'Where were you last night? It wasn't Eddie's, man. It was an academic soirée.

That girl wasn't going to throw her reputation away on some longhaired tramp she just met.'

'Fuck you. I had my best shirt on.'

'You've got to move slow, man.'

'The day I take advice off you about chicks is the day I shoot myself.'

They glare at each other for a moment; both faces are tense.

'Sorry,' Tom says after a pause. 'That was low.'

'Damn right it was low.'

'Come on, cut me some slack. I've got a hangover.'

Dante turns away and stays quiet.

'Don't mess around, Dante. I said I'm sorry.'

'Drop it.'

'No I won't. I'm a prick. I don't deserve a girl.'

'That's right, you don't. Think before you open your mouth.'

Tom sighs and drifts over to the chair. 'You know what I'm like.

Man, I have to get laid. Maybe it'll be better when the students come back.'

Dante shakes his head in exasperation.

'What?' Tom asks.

'Nothing.'

'Come on, Dante. We're on holiday, man. Why are we arguing?

All that is in the past, and this place is the shit. I just need to find my feet.'

Dante sighs. 'Don't break anything in the meantime.'

'I promise. You won't know I'm here.'

'Time for work,' he says, and returns his attention to the pile of Eliot's books, gathering dust in the corner of the room.

'Fuck that,' Tom says. 'Let's go for a walk, check out the beach –' he sniggers '– Who knows what we'll find? Then we can go out and eat tonight. Hit a few bars.'

'Nah, I have to read Eliot's books. I'm seeing him tomorrow night.'

'Why at night?'

'Dunno. And Tom, we have to save money. I'm not blowing the stash in some pub. I have to make a start.'

'We've been here three days and we've seen nothing.'

'And the cash won't last forever.'

'Don't worry, man.'

'Tom, are you deaf? I am going to read today.'

'Touchy. What's up with you?'

Dante shakes his head. 'I had no sleep last night.'

'You kipped in here. What's that all about?'

Feeling uncomfortable, Dante adjusts his slouch on the sofa and lights a second cigarette. 'Bad dreams.'

Tom laughs. 'So you were a fraidy cat and couldn't sleep in your own bed.'

'I kid you not, it was awful. A dream I used to have all the time as a kid. And after I woke up . . .'

'What?'

'You'll piss yourself, so I'm not telling you.'

'Sod that. Tell me.'

'I saw a ghost or something.'

Tom raises his eyebrows, but he doesn't laugh. 'No shit.'

'At the end of my bed. There was like this figure sitting on the floor. Then it stood up and walked straight past my bed, and went through the door. I freaked and came in here.'

'So that's why all the lights were on this morning. You must have been spooked.'

'I haven't shat myself like that since I was about ten. It's weird.'

Tom looks into the garden. 'Funny, that.'

Cocking his head at Tom, who now looks pensive, he asks, 'Why do you say that?'

'That scream. Remember that scream the other night?'

Dante nods.

'Well, I heard it again last night. Not the same voice, mind, but a different one. Right across the road from my room. Came from the cliffs or the castle. It was really faint, like it was far off or down by the sea. But it was awful. At first I thought it was the wind or something, then I swore I heard someone yell, "help me". They said "God help me" or something like that. Funny we should both get freaked.'

'I didn't hear anything in here, but I believe you. Something's up with this place. Last night when I was walking home, I heard this kind of dog or something, running on the other side of the wall by the Quad. And then I get the nightmare, and see that ghost thing.'